"More than 230,000 students from more than 180 countries have enrolled
in massive open online classes, known as MOOCs, offered by UNC since
July 2013." reports Katie Kilmartin.
People across the globe continue to take advantage of
world-class professors by enrolling in the classes, but UNC professors
teaching the massive classes have also benefited.
After teaching
MOOCs as large as 40,000 students, economics professor Buck Goldstein,
said he learned how to facilitate and communicate with his large
lectures better.
“Probably the biggest lesson of this semester has been that we
can use techniques from the MOOC to make on campus class better,” he
said.
In Goldstein’s MOOC, “What’s Your Big Idea?” students
communicated and discussed the material through 900 forums online.
Goldstein said he plans to use forums in his Introduction to
Entrepreneurship course with about 320 students enrolled to foster
communication and to help students help each other.
Rob Bruce,
director of the Friday Center, said MOOCs are an educational experiment
and give professors the ability to reach students across the world.
“The primary reason we became involved is to see what we can learn
and also to see how these courses, when we create them, can be used in a
face-to-face classroom as well,” he said.
Since the inception of
MOOCs at UNC, 7 courses have been offered through Coursera. Each course,
free and available to anyone, lasts about six weeks with prerecorded
lectures, forums for participation and quizzes.
A majority of people enrolled in MOOCs live outside of the U.S.
The
hope for these massive courses were to make world-class teachers and
educational institutions accessible to people across the world, law
professor Donald Hornstein said.
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Source: The Daily Tar Heel